50 Percent of Spanish Newspaper's Readers Think Real Madrid Should Sell Cristiano Ronaldo

This is exceedingly hard to do, but Real Madrid fans often make college football fans seem sane by comparison. For the latest instance of this, in a poll by Spanish sports daily AS taken by 31,000 readers nearly half (49.96 percent to be exact) voted Real Madrid should sell Cristiano Ronaldo. Bear in mind not everyone who took the poll is a fan of the club — and these sort of polls aren’t usually very scientific — but it stands to reason a high percentage who voted were fans of the team, which is wildly popular across the globe.

Given what’s going on with the Kansas City Royals and the All-Star Game vote, we should probably be leery of any sort of online polling at the moment.

That said, this voting illustrates the insane demands of many European soccer fans, especially at Real Madrid where nothing is ever good enough. A year ago Real Madrid its historic 10th Champions League title and Copa del Rey. In the recently concluded 2014-15 campaign the team didn’t win anything and promptly fired Carlo Ancelotti and replaced him with Rafa Benitez.

Now this is a bold statement, but bear with me. Ronaldo, who scored 61 goals in 54 appearances for the club in the year including 48 in the league, probably isn’t its biggest problem. Crazy, I know.

Ronaldo, if he went on the market, would probably fetch a transfer fee for Madrid in the range of $150+ million, but his value to the team itself would be irreplaceable, saying nothing of what Lionel Messi continues to do at rival Barcelona. The list of clubs who could afford Ronaldo is short: PSG, Manchester City and maybe Chelsea.

And as we know Ronaldo is going to let his contract run out and then sign with MLS and live up the high life in Los Angeles. Duh.

As always, nothing is ever good enough when you support a mega-club.